Ugly Journaling

Ugly journaling… 5 stars – highly recommend!!

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I have always been a strong advocate for writing things down, getting your feelings out of your head and onto a piece of paper – especially if you can’t speak about them. I encourage the kids to do it all the time, and I have done it since I was a teenager! Writing letters that end up being burned or scribbling down thoughts that end up in the bin… it’s not where they end up that matters really, it’s just to get them out of my head!

My mistake over recent years however is that I always wrote how I thought I should write, not how I needed to. Pretty colours, not totally honest, underlined dates and times and skirting around the issues …

So recently, despite the pretty journal, I have started what I am referring to as ugly journaling! 

Ugly, hard, emotional but god damn is it therapeutic!! Messy writing, messy use of language, messy ways of recounting events and feelings… because life is messy! 

No matter how we try to dress up life with pretty colours and fancy pens, it is frikking messy… and this honesty with myself is so liberating!

So much so that I think I scared the life out of Aidan when he walked into the room to find a red eyed, sweaty faced, uncontrollably hard crying, bawling wife! But I was actually fine – I was more than fine, I felt great! To be honest, it was draining and it was emotional but it was so needed!!